Friday 24 June 2011

CALIFORNIA ROAD TRIP!!!

After too much mud and too many bugs in Tayrona, I was angry at Colombia. So, we decided to leave (for a small change-of-plane-ticket-fee), and spend the final 2 weeks of our whimsical holiday on a CALIFORNIA ROAD TRIP.
  • Step 1: Arrive Super 8 Motel LAX at 2am in the morning (first ever motor-inn experience);
  • Step 2: Pick up hire car from Avis. Pay way too much for insurance, fall for upgrading to a more ‘fuel efficient’ car, and pay more to hire a GPS for 2 weeks than a GPS actually costs retail (and later break GPS and will be charged when the damages have been quantified);
  • Step 3: Drive to Pismo Beach! Beautiful! Eat ribs at Mo’s Smokehouse. Over-order and feel fat, and look fat;
Mo's Smokehouse - they know ribs

mo Mo

Big Ribs

Missing surfing ...
  • Step 4: Monterey! Check into Motor Inn #2. It smells like Indian food. Walk to the wharf at night. Sit in a bar and watch old people dance to songs like “My Girl” and “Pretty Woman”. Marvel at how good everyone danced in South America and vice versa;
Taffy shoppe - Monterey

Novelty penny - Monterey

Hi - my names Forest Gump ...

  • Step 5: Hire bikes at Lover's Beach and cycle along the 17 mile drive – past amazing golf courses, Pebble Beach, beautiful rocky beaches and quaint houses;
Bike touring - 17 mile road (about 5 miles for us)

  • Step 6: Picnic at Carmel Beach – white sand, crystal blue water, big waves, cold wind and dogs bouncing everywhere;
Carmel-by-the-sea - picnic lunch

  • Step 7: Drive along Pacific Coast Drive – steep cliffs, wind-ey road, deserted misty beaches, and an elephant seal colony!;

Lazy seals

Angry angry seals

Elephant seals come onto the beach to dry out and shed their coat for summer
  • Step 8: Drive to San Francisco – Check into apparently normal hotel (which we later realise is full of crazies), find a place to leave our car and EXPLORE. LOVE SAN FRANCISCO!
    • The refurbished ferry wharf holds an amazing farmers market and is filled with gourmet shops containing everything biodynamic, organic, grain-fed, vegan, fresh and local;
San Francisco - foodie town

Heirloom tomato stand - Ferry Market San Fran
    • Chinatown is huge, old and real - full of great shopping and restaurants;
Chinatown - great Yum Cha
Jersey Shore bobbing heads ... 

SF Chinatown
    • There is an amazing bookstore, City Lights, beside an old, unfashionable, not-cool-but-cool bar called Vesuvius where we drank afternoon martinis (typical in San Francisco);
City Lights Bookstore

Vesuvio Bar SF - Martinis at 3pm

    • We walked up to a lookout over the city - Coit Tower - and strolled the streets;
My new friend SF - Coit Tower

Coit Tower

Streets of SF

Pacman - SF

more street art

Bussing round SF

    • We visited Japan-town and ate ramen noodles;
    • We went to the edge of the bay and watched wind surfers freeze in the water and took photos of the bridge;
Windsurfing under Golden Gate

    • Fisherman’s wharf – totally kitch but fun – love sourdough bread;
Chowder in Sourdough - Fishermans Market SF

Pearls Burgers - SF

  • Step 9: Drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Woods – observe the woods from afar as there is nowhere to park the car;
Golden Gate Bridge 

  • Step 10: NAPA VALLEY. Beautiful day of driving – to the oldest cheese factory in the USA, eat cheese and bread and drink wine by a lake, visit Hass winery (impressive art collection, average wine, nice setting), and buy a wire globe for storing corks in (just what I wanted!);
Picnic in the park - Novato (near Napa Valley) 

Hess Collection sculptures

Hess Collection Napa Valley

  • Step 11: Drive towards Yosemite National Park – spend a night in Merced – we stay in Travelodge Motel, which was a bit itchy and had green carpet. We ate dinner at McDonalds. Classy;
  • Step 12: Drive to Yosemite for the day. Amazing! Spectacular granite cliffs, beautiful waterfalls;
Yosemite

Amazing...
Roots of a sequioa tree
We left a banana in the hot car to attract black bears ...
  • Step 13: Eat pizza in Fresno. Stay in a TERRIBLE motel called Motel 6. 
Big pizza - Fresno, yes Fresno

    Thursday 23 June 2011

    Parque Nacional Tayrona – Just like a national park, only chunky …

    Unfortunately for us, we decided to do Tayrona the hard way. Lonely Planet told us that if we caught a boat  into the Park we would be risking a fine ("or worse"(?!)) from the military, so we played it safe and caught a 45 minute taxi to the gates.

    Once you arrive at the gates your bags are searched by the army (item by item) looking for drugs and alcohol. It would seem that the aim of the government (or rather the private company that owns 95% of the “National Park”) is that you buy these goods (drugs and alcohol) within the park at greatly inflated prices – not sure if this is a great use of the army's time.

    After this, you pay a $20 entrance fee, and then you need to pay either for a bus or another $10 to allow your taxi to drop you off at the start of the walking trail. And so our taxi dropped us off at the top of a 40 minute path to the first beach where we would have a look for accom, but not be able to swim because of apparently bad rips.

    This “path” was in the middle of the jungle, stinking hot and not maintained (thanks entrance fee). I found myself with a 15kg pack on my back, drenched with sweat, up to my knees in mud and dodging half constructed stairs. This hell continued for 2 hours, nearly double the amount indicated by the Park. At the very end of the path, it meets up with another path used for horses, and runs for another 50 metres or so. This section of the path is literally a bog. When we saw the horses chomping on their hay about 50 metres away and we could see mud lines up to their chests. This was not going to be fun. Mish ditched the thongs and set off, pulling her legs out of the mud one at a time, while I managed to clamber around the side in the relative safety of ankle high mud.

    "Path"

    Interesting experience
    Our next challenge was finding somewhere to rest our weary heads for the night, which wasn’t difficult, but the options were rather disheartening. At one end of the spectrum was a $250 a night Cabana, which would not have been out of place in an Aussie trailer park, where it would go for no more than $50 a night – not a great option for a couple of backpackers. At the other end of the spectrum - it was $10 each for a hammock with a mosquito net, in a massive open sided hut, housing around 150 other hammocks. We went with the cheap option (which annoyingly was not even that cheap by South/Central American standards), This was going to be interesting.

    Hammocks make your legs lose feeling after an hour or so

    We deposited our stuff into a locker and practically sprinted for the nearest swimmable beach, about a 20 minute walk away. The setting in Tayrona is again absolutely stunning, rolling jungle hills descending to the beautiful blue Caribbean with only a small border of golden sand. Never before had  water been so rewarding - almost 8 hours after we set off in the morning we could finally relax. And then, as we were settling into our newly acquired blissful state, I spotted a sea snake less than a metre from us and the moment was gone.

    Beach near our hammocks - beautiful but no swimming

    That night we had drinks at an adjacent camp site, as we decided we would need a few to manage a kip in the hammocks. As we were finishing up there was a massive tropical downpour which continued through the night. We managed to sleep a little despite numerous bouts of losing feeling in our legs. And the frogs. And the mosquitos that got through the nets.

    The next day we went on another hot, humid, muddy walk to the most beautiful beach in the park, Cabo San Juan. We had to walk along the rip-prone beach where we had walked the previous day, but this time with our packs. About halfway up the beach, there is a small stream which runs out to the ocean. The day before we had had found the shallowest part of the stream to walk through and so naturally we headed for it again. The water was slightly browner than the day before due to the downpour and looking towards the point where we were going to cross there was a rock that looked a lot like a crocodile. Mish was walking about 3 metres ahead of me and as she was about to step on the rock to start crossing the river I realised it WAS a crocodile. I screamed out to Mish that it was a croc and she froze for a second, before turning and running away. All I could thinkof was how fast crocodile could run on land and I just stood there staring at Mish’s footsteps, not more than a metre from the crocodiles’ head!

    Photo of crocodile waiting for tourists on the beach (from a safer distance)
    There are many signs on the beach warning that it is unsafe for swimming due to dangerous currents, but no signs warning of salt water crocodiles - it was the first time we became aware that they lived in the park! We thought back on our out-in-the-open sleeping arrangements the night before and felt lucky! 

    After recovering our hearts from our mouths, we trudged along another path which was way longer than our guidebook suggested, and found a nice spot on Cabo to relax for a couple of ours before catching a boat back to Taganga (which we were surprisingly happy to see after the previous 36 hours).

    Playa Cabo - niceness, at last

    Along the way the boat stopped at Playa Cristal – which was the most beautiful beach I saw in Colombia. Unfortunately, we only had 10 minutes to appreciate it before we had to jump back on the boat. The views from the boat on the way home were fantastic, with the intense green jungle meeting cliffs which plunged into the Caribbean.

    We spent the next night in Santa Marta, a nothing little town, because we couldn’t get a bus back to Cartagena at a decent hour. But we sleep well!

    Sunday 12 June 2011

    Taganga - where rubbish lives

    Honestly, those who say Taganga is great, are wrong – or maybe they were right, once upon a time. Fair enough the heat of the Caribbean makes one forget time and relax, however, the beach and the surrounding beaches are downright ugly and dirty. Colombians should be ashamed to have allowed such a stunning setting to fall into such disgrace, but perhaps they don’t care, as we saw hundreds of them swimming in amongst the bottles, plastic bags and dirty nappies in the sea (all photographed as evidence).

    Taganga is set amongst the Jungle which slopes down towards the sea, and is really is a stunning setting. However, as you descend into the town you realise that things have really gone wrong here in a bad way. The roads off the main beach are hard to walk in, let alone drive a car. 



    Playa Grande - nice from a distance
    Down on the beach, things weren’t looking great with a dirty sand beach littered with rock and rubbish. After taking a look at the beach we consoled ourselves as we had read there is a beach down a cliff path which was supposed to be one of the best in the region. It still pains me to write that this magical beach, Playa Grande, was perhaps the worst beach either of us have ever seen. Again the setting was great, but the beach was full of dirt and grime, huge piles of rubbish floated amongst playing children. The back of the beach was lined with huge tin warehouses which were apparently restaurants, however, despite being hungry, we had lost our appetite due to the disappointment we felt.


    Rubbish in the water

    Swimming in the rubbish



    Waves lapping on the shore



    You can see how perhaps this was once a great place to hang out, with the deep bay littered with fishing boats, fishermen offloading their catch straight onto the beach for sale (or pictures with tourists) and occasional glimpses of true local life at the soccer field or Salsa club on a Sunday afternoon. It has potential to be an intoxicating mix. However it does not handle well the massive influx of tourists from abroad or from Santa Marta on the weekends, and perhaps it is no wonder that the best place to be in Taganga is underwater on a scuba diving course – of which it is well known that Taganga has some of the cheapest (not the best).

    Passing long beach days with no beach with Aguila beer
    Things we liked about Taganga:

    • Good cheap seafood. We ate multiple times at a restaurant called Botarico (which we found out was in the Lonely Planet – which would explain why it was always full). Red snapper, Cazuela (seafood stew), spag bol all really good;
    Breakfast
    Arepa snacks
    • Our apartment, which we moved to after a less than impressive stay at the Divanga hostel (where they gave us a discount of 1 dollar for having construction outside our room at 730am Saturday);
    •  The walk along the cliff to Playa Grande gave really nice views back to the town and once around the corner down to Playa Grande (it’s not about the destination ...);
    • Bar Pachamama was good fun. We had some great drinks and snacks and good conversation with the bartender and his friend (the drug dealer);
    Our favourite menu in town
    • Mish “caught” someone trying to break into our apartment. We were coming home late one night and as I opened the outer gate to our complex Mish spotted a guy coming across the road and casually informed me about him. As mish went inside the man said something to me in Spanish, indicating he wanted to come in, when I told him to go away (in my finest French) he grabbed the door and I had to wrestle it away from him and slam it shut. Mish of course was oblivious to the fracas, but later said he looked friendly because he had a beer in his hand … go figure.
    Sunset